Persistence

Twenty-four oceans
Twenty-four skies
Twenty-four failures
And twenty-four tries
Twenty-four finds me
In twenty-fourth place
With twenty-four drop outs
At the end of the day

Life is not what I thought it was
Twenty-four hours ago
Still I'm singing 'Spirit,
take me up in arms with You'
And I'm not who I thought I was
Twenty-four hours ago
Still I'm singing 'Spirit,
take me up in arms with You'

It's funny how life tests you everyday in the smallest possible things. The idea of life, according to me, is to check how far can you sustain something that's been going wrong since quite some time. If you want to change a certain habit of yours you feel is not so great and it's affecting you negatively, and you see someone else doing just the opposite and savoring its sweet consequences, then the initial tries will not give you the same results as it does for that person. Initially you'll face a lot of disappointments and failures, and that's the point where you decide to revert back to being what you were, thinking that luck's never with me. Or that I'm going to face disappointment in whatever I do. No matter how much I try to change, things never change. But if you still manage to continue despite the failures, things will change. You'll start noticing the change gradually. And then, as time progresses, you'll also start getting the same results as the other person, who inspired you, did. Basically, life's testing you to see how desperately you want to adopt that habit or anything for that instance. And every good change has to pass thru' nature's test and then only are you rewarded. 'Persistence' is the key-word here.

Even in the most trying situations, if you sustain yourself very well, give it back in the face of difficulty, prove that you're not gonna give in no matter what, then automatically you'll stop getting problems of such sort later on. Life always throws problems or difficulties of an intensity, which are higher than your capacity to take them. The idea is to see how well you cope up with them. If you can get yourself out of the most trying circumstances, you win and you'll seldom face any such problem. But if you don't, you'll keep facing problems of some sort or other every now and then. It's a kind of training that goes on throughout your lifetime until you achieve the level of success that you're supposed to.

And when I heard this song, Twenty-Four by Switchfoot for the first time, it reflected on the same habit of not giving up. No matter what happens, if you feel you're going on the right path, continue doing so. There's no short-cut to success, they say. And it applies in this context very well I guess.